The cancer spectrum and genetic pathways underlying tumorigenesis vary among different ethnic populations due to genetic background and/or environment discrepancies. We have implied in our previous study that the genetic alterations found in bladder cancers of Chinese patients differ from those of Caucasians. We performed the present study to explore the genetic pathways of the urothelial carcinoma (UC) in Chinese patients. We carried out a partial allelotyping of Chinese UC on chromosome arms commonly deleted in Caucasian UC, and compared the allelo-typing between Chinese and Caucasian UC. Forty-five Chinese UC specimens were allelotyped using 30 microsatellite markers on 18 chromosome arms. The most frequent regions of loss of heterozygosity found included 9q (54.1%), 17p (51.2%), 9p (48.8%), 18q (42.2%), 3p (41.9%), 16q (33.5%) and 11p (30.0%). Compared with UC from the UK and US, the LOH frequencies on most chromosome arms in this study are higher, with statistically significant differences on 3p, 16q and 18q. Our results suggest that both consensus and different alterations exist between Chinese and Caucasian UC, indicating that genetic alterations of cancer can vary between different ethnic populations due to genetic and/or etiological discrepancies.